Balmain PRE-FALL 2022 MENSWEAR
“ Do you still buy magazines ?” That chilling sentence , which Olivier Rousteing said was doodled after the style of Kurt Cobain in his journals , leaps out from its position on a weathered leather monochrome tote featured in Look 1 of menswear and 26 of womenswear within this pre-fall Balmain ensemble . Of it , Rousteing said : “ This sentence is something that scares me a lot , but I wanted to use it because we are living in a world where something that was so relevant and important is becoming so vintage . And I ’ m really scared that for a new generation , maybe in one or two decades , you will have to explain what a magazine is . The same way you have to explain Kodak now . Or what a tape is .”
Having just hit a decade at Balmain and steered himself through a medical crisis , this ever-thoughtful designer has been extra contemplative of late . And as the magazine riff intimated , Rousteing , 36 , has been thinking about his particular seating position in fashion ’ s passage of time : “ I feel that I ’ m not so old , but also I ’ m not young anymore either …. And that ’ s so weird when you have seen all these evolutions-slash-revolutions of the fashion industry .”
Here Rousteing went both back in time and forward to tie together different strands of his Balmain-centric consideration in a freshly shaped knot . There were strong houndstooth ( pied-de-poule ) and Breton stripe ( la marinière ) sections to mark la patrimoine , and petites mains exercising adventures in embellishment , embroidery , and fourrure ( all faux ) to service the house ’ s couture tradition . On top of these were layered elements more contemporary — decadently oversized synthetic outerwear , complex-washed denim , stompy boots — which were themselves all merely another layer in a future-facing mille-feuille that stretched from the couture ( broken sculpture latex sheath dresses , a Zendaya red carpet cert ) to the sporting ( Balmain-customized protective gear by the Californian moto brand Fox Racing ).
The conceptual glue holding all these spaceship- ( or time machine –) shot look book elements together went back to that scrawled text , based on Cobain ’ s notebooks . Rousteing explained that he ’ d embraced the tear-it-up-and-start-again philosophy of grunge this season , and had been partially inspired by memories of his earliest days working with KCD ’ s late lamented Ed Filipowski . He said : “ I remember Ed telling me I was the rebel in fashion of my time , and talking about brands he had worked with earlier who were very affected and influenced by grunge … and this was interesting because even though I am French and do not look like a guitarist from Seattle in the ’ 90s , there is for sure this grunginess in me . The second reason I have come to grunge now is that after my accident , I realized that in the past I have been searching for a perfection that maybe turned out to be a stereotype of perfection . I realized that true perfection can lie in imperfection . And so I wanted to fuck up my embroideries , and make the pieces seem torn , in order to allow the beauty of imperfection , achieved through craftsmanship , to be seen .”
Rousteing ’ s work at Balmain is becoming increasingly self-aware , honest , and complex in tandem with his own personal development . Inspired by everything from the velvet on his furniture to the burn scars on his fingers — yet always informed by his profound engagement with the dialect of Balmain — his output mirrors both house and designer with a verisimilitude that only a few other historic maisons can match . As for his distressing Kodak moment vis-à-vis print , as the recent history of vinyl suggests , the story of fashion magazines — which are , after all , the couture of fashion media to digital ’ s ready-towear and social ’ s fast fashion — might not be on its final page quite yet .
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